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COVARIATES, CONFOUNDERS, AND CONSISTENCY: CHARACTERIZING THE VIETNAM VETERAN FOR 26 EPIDEMIOLOGIC STUDIES PROJECT 2: COVARIATES, CONFOUNDERS, AND CONSISTENCY: CHARACTERIZING THE VIETNAM VETERAN FOR EPIDEMIOLOGIC STUDIES The Columbia University researchers' proposal indicated that the primary aim of Project 2 was to identify and evaluate key variables and other aspects of military experience in Vietnam, such as herbicide handling and exposure to combat stress, that need to be taken into account in future epidemiologic studies of Vietnam veterans. Such knowledge will be essential in developing the conceptual framework and design of future studies. A second, equally important goal was to examine and evaluate the quality of methods of military-unit identification for individual veterans, because it is through the military unit that linkage with the herbicide- exposure database is effected. One aspect of reaching this goal was to assess the reliability of veterans' recall and of various approaches to obtaining military-unit data on people who may be enrolled in epidemiologic studies. A third goal was to address issues of generalizability by carrying out surveys in different populations of veterans with a focus on assessment of exposure to herbicides, military combat, and physical and mental-health outcomes that are likely to be relevant to future Vietnam-veteran studies. To accomplish those objectives, the researchers designed and conducted three substudies: ⢠A follow-up study of members of the American Legion who were originally surveyed in 1984â1985 and who made up the study population in previously published epidemiologic work (Stellman SD et al., 1988a, 1988b; Stellman JM et al., 1988; Snow et al., 1988), ⢠A survey of veterans in minority groups (blacks and Latinos) that may have been underrepresented in previous studies,
